


The Stake in Hell's Kitchen is Killer (But It Needs a Little Salt)

by YamiTami



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angels are Dicks, Gen, Gordon Ramsay - Freeform, I Don't Even Know, Mild Blood, moderate swearing, there's no 'AU inspired by late night rambles about ramsay as a hunter' tag, what kind of AU is this even, yeah you heard me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-06
Updated: 2013-11-06
Packaged: 2017-12-31 15:32:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1033343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YamiTami/pseuds/YamiTami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I don't even know if I'm supposed to put a serious summary since it turned out to be a semi-serious fic or just to be ridiculous because Gordon Ramsay is a hunter. </p><p>You know that meme where Ramsay is shouting at someone and they put the words 'this steak is so salty the Winchesters use it to hunt demons'? Yeah, that's what happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Stake in Hell's Kitchen is Killer (But It Needs a Little Salt)

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be an amusing little ficlet based off tumblr dash shenanigans inspired by the 'this is so ____ that ____' Ramsay meme that's been floating around. That was five months and 15,000 words ago. I can't not do plot.

Every hunter questioned what might have been. Even if they were better adjusted to the life than most they would still find themselves wondering how things might have been different. If that vampire nest hadn’t set up in the abandoned house down the street, if that demon hadn’t come to the school picnic, if they’d never happened upon those ghouls in the morgue. Everyone wonders what their lives would have been like if they’d never known that monsters were real.

Typically, Gordon found himself wondering whenever he stopped at a particularly good or bad restaurant. Not the fast food chains with grease bleeding through the paper sacks, those places he could stand being lackluster. It wasn’t their job to be spiced and savory; they were supposed to be fast and cheap and he found himself ordering a combo multiple times during a case. But once he’d put down whatever was terrorizing the town of the day he’d pick out a nice looking bistro or café—not a chain—and sit down for a nice leisurely meal.

When the food and the atmosphere were exceptional then Gordon would find himself feeling a little wistful about the things that might have been. How long would it have taken him to work his way up to head chef? By what age would he have owned his own restaurant? How many countries would he have been given the opportunity to work in? 

Then there were the bad ones where the meat was more dried out than a hundred year corpse and the scallops were so tough that he could have used them for bullets. The places where Gordon wanted to just walk up to the owner and shake them. It was in _those_ places where there was grime on the baseboards, poorly presented dishes, and cooks without a clue that Gordon would sometimes wonder if he could have made a career out of going around to restaurants needing help and yelling at them until they shaped up. Well, maybe not literal yelling and he would be offering genuine help, obviously, but people who routinely overcooked good fish and then refused to admit to it deserved a few well crafted insults.

Either way, he’d always end up taking a deep breath, shake his head at his own foolishness, and silently remind himself that it was pointless to wonder. It had been decades and he still couldn’t stomach the thought of going back into an industrial kitchen. All the polished steel, the wide ranges, the white coats... the first time he stepped back into one after The Incident he could smell the blood and burning hair and barely made it to the back alley before he threw up. No matter how he tried he couldn’t scrub the scene from his memory. Being able to see the fryers behind the clerk at the fast food chains wasn’t quite as bad—whole different species—but a real, gourmet kitchen? He knew he’d never be able to look at one without being sick again. He picked the wrong restaurant on the wrong night when three of the chefs revealed themselves as three pagan gods with a taste for human flesh. They talked too much and had explained that they’d been picking off people for years, but then the head chef figured out that something was up and the gods decided that the ruse had run its course so why not have some fun? ‘Fun’ meaning that they slaughtered the kitchen staff and nearly everyone in the dining room. Only eight survived.

Sometimes Gordon still woke up in a cold sweat with the image of a sink full of lungs or the livers laid out in a row on the counter. He had been stupidly, _stupidly_ lucky in that they’d tossed him down next to the corpse of the head chef. The monsters were joking about how best to serve him as he would be the dish of honor in their little banquet, so the man was still in all his clothes and intact aside from the deep gash across his neck. Gordon had searched the blood sticky clothes in desperation while the gods laughed at him. Then he found the wooden stake in the head chef’s inside coat pocket and stabbed the closest in the chest. While the other two were still in shock he dove for the second, and then the third was distracted by another customer’s well timed punch and all three turned to ash.

Gordon was lucky that the head chef had done some research, lucky that he hadn’t been taken seriously, lucky that he hit what passed for their hearts the first time. As he learned more about the world he never wanted to be a part of he came to truly understand how lucky he had been. The reading and the research started out as a way to understand what had happened, but as it became more and more clear that he would never be a chef it turned into a profession. He learned how to fight, he learned how to hunt, and with a few of the other survivors of that horrific night sponsoring him he set out in his new life of killing the things hiding in the dark.

By the time he hit 2009 he’d been in the game long enough to know there was an ebb and flow to these things. Some years the activity would die down, some years it would surge. Usually a surge it meant that some hotshot had the ambition and the means to get a group of nasties to work together and cause exponentially more damage. Sometimes this would give the solitary monsters a boost of courage to venture further out of their cages. Then someone would salt, shoot, or stab the bastards and the region would hit a lull. Unfortunately this didn’t ever mean vacation time for the hunters—a decrease in vampire activity didn’t mean that the witches were sitting down—but it was normal.

So, when demonic activity was noticeably on the rise Gordon didn’t think much of it. He brushed up on his exorcisms and demonic signs, of course, but he didn’t think it was anything more than some demon with delusions of grandeur clawing their way to the surface and knocking a few of their ilk into coordinated chaos. Gordon wasn’t much for demons anyway. He’d take care of any he came across, obviously, but he was usually on the lookout for the ‘gods’ making snacks of human beings. So he only paid half a mind to it, expecting that sooner or later someone would find the leader and put it down.

Then it just kept getting worse.

In 2010 it got bad enough that Gordon stopped trying to actively find people-munchers and threw himself into demonic research. There were rising trends and then there was hell on earth. Literally, Hell on Earth, if what he was seeing was any indication. There were far more demons roaming around than there ever should be and they were bolder than any badass general would have given them the courage for. Something was seriously wrong and no one seemed to know what it was. To make matters worse the amount of chaos the demons were causing was a great cover for other monsters to get a little bit braver. There was just no way to keep up. It had gotten to the point that his benefactors asked Gordon to send them the survivors who were hunter material—enough sense to keep their wits about them in a fight but not enough sense to run screaming. Gordon wasn’t particularly thrilled with the idea, but he also knew he had little other choice with the way everything was falling apart. 

Hunters were by definition solitary creatures. Some hunted in pairs and very rarely you got three but there were no large parties roaming the back roads. Part of it was because it was easier for a couple of people to slip past the law, but a lot of it was because the nature of the business didn’t make for a lot of spare trust. You had yourself, sometimes you had a partner, and if you were lucky you had a handful of people supporting you with information, finances, and fake backgrounds. Everything else was temporary alliances that only lasted until a particular job was done.

Gordon was a bit of an anomaly as the five people backing him were all very well off. It was a five star restaurant, after all. What that meant is that he never had to hustle pool, but also that when they got this idea into their heads they actually had the resources to make it happen. They reached out to other knots of hunters and their sponsors and support teams; some scoffed at the idea, some took a look at their recent scars and decided to take a chance. After the first ‘class’ of four went through and were far better equipped to handle a fight than any of the older hunters had been when they first set out on the road Gordon started to think that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. A year after his sponsors first told him their plan and they had a semi-official academy set up with ‘campuses’ in two states. Beyond that, they had the start of a network that benefited any hunter who signed up. Given how resistant the community had always been to that kind of trust it was amazing how quickly it all came together. And all it took was the world trying to tear itself apart.

Things took an extra step into the surreal when Gordon was on his way back from Montreal. He was there to talk to the local hunters about the possibility of taking their network international. They had been hesitant but hadn’t shown him the door straightaway, which was as best as could be expected. When it happened he was halfway back ‘home’ in some nowhere town which was blissfully free of demonic signs, staying at the usual crappy motel. He had gone for a walk, enjoying the rare moment of peace which had gotten only rarer in the past couple years, and had happened upon a quaint little café. There was a slight chill in the air and none of the outdoor tables were occupied, so Gordon grabbed a cup of coffee and sat there alone with his thoughts.

Then, against all odds, his life got even weirder.

Gordon had glanced towards a park across the street, watching the way the leaves moved, and when he looked back at his cup a man was sitting in the seat across from him. He hadn’t heard footsteps or the scrape of the chair on the concrete. Gordon’s hunter instincts blazed and he slid a hand inside his jacket to grip his iron knife.

“I can’t _believe_ I’m doing this,” the stranger said in a deeply exasperated tone. He was a lanky guy with messy hair and heavy stubble on his jaw, dressed in simple V-neck and black jacket. There wasn’t anything obviously remarkable about him aside from his ability to sneak up on a hunter. 

Gordon remained guarded. “Excuse me, but I was out here alone for a reason.”

The man rolled his eyes. “Dad save me from touchy hunters. This is more important than your coffee.”

“... All right.” Gordon tried to figure out if he could get out of town before the cops grabbed him if he stabbed the creature then and there. He hadn’t even been hunting in that area; there was no reason for this thing to know he was a hunter unless it had powers or had been following him.

The stranger looked even more annoyed and suddenly Gordon’s hand was curled around air. “Honestly,” it said as it twirled the blade in the air. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

“Somehow I’m finding it hard to believe that,” Gordon said through gritted teeth. He didn’t like being taken by surprise.

“Well, believe it. Besides, if I wanted you dead you’d already be meeting your reaper.”

Gordon considered how his knife had vanished and reappeared in the creature’s hand and decided that it was probably telling the truth. At least, it didn’t want to kill him yet, which begged the question of what it wanted from him.

“What are you?”

“Don’t you mean ‘who’?”

Gordon grit his teeth. He didn’t like being played with. “No, I’m fairly certain I mean ‘what’.”

“Are all hunters this breathtakingly rude?” The stranger sighed dramatically. “That would be my luck. Oh, and by the way, I’m an _angel of heaven_ , thank you very much.”

As a general rule of thumb a hunter should never completely disregard insane claims because at least some of the times those claims end up being true. This, however, was a little over the top even for Gordon’s line of work.

“Right then. So I suppose you’re hiding your wings under that coat?”

It chuckled. “More a plane of existence slightly out of phase with this one. Not that you’d understand the metaphysics involved there...”

Gordon decided that he seriously disliked this thing, whatever it was. “So what are the odds of getting proof to back up this claim of yours?”

“Hmph. If I showed you my magnificent wings then you’d go blind, if it didn’t outright kill you. Consider yourself lucky that I’m so polite to you annoying little apes.”

That nixed the idea that this was just a crazy human; only the things that weren’t humans talked like that.

Gordon took a slow sip of his coffee, steeling himself to speak calmly even though he was practically vibrating with adrenaline. “If you have an offer or threat then get on with it. I have a long drive ahead of me and I don’t have time to listen to the likes of you.”

“Must be a hunter thing,” it mumbled. Then with exaggerated brightness it stuck out its hand. “Balthazar, nice to meet you.”

Gordon eyed the offered hand as though it were a poisonous snake.

‘Balthazar’ shrugged and returned its hand to its lap. “Suit yourself. It’s not as though I need your introduction to know that you’re Gordon Ramsay: sullen hunter. I don’t know why I thought this was a good idea...”

“ _What_ idea?”

“Collecting you. Adopting you. I’m not really sure what the proper term would be. The whole business leaves a bad taste in my mouth, frankly, and I don’t see where Cassie finds the appeal in—“

“Okay, you know what, I order you to start making sense,” Gordon interrupted tiredly. That had to be a new record for the speed in which he reached the point that he didn’t care if he pissed the thing off as long as it stopped talking.

“Fine, fine. You’ve all your sugar daddies and mommies and you and your merry band of misfits are sadly in the best position on the planet to do something about this demon problem. It’s made travel _so_ inconvenient.”

“Let me make sure I understand this,” Gordon said slowly and with his rage barely in check. “You want to use me and mine because the demons slaughtering people across the globe makes it harder for you to travel?”

Balthazar looked at him as though he’d said something ridiculous. “Yes, that does sum it up. Did I stutter or something?”

“You know, I’m really starting to dislike you.”

“It’s a business relationship, Rams, you don’t have to like me.”

Gordon decided that he’d had enough and stood. “I don’t have to do anything. That’s the great thing about free will.”

Balthazar seemed amused by that. “Free will, right.”

Sick of the whole thing, Gordon decided to chance walking away. He hadn’t gotten more than two steps when Balthazar called. “So then I supposed you don’t want to know about the raid that’s going to descend on your Mississippi base?”

Gordon spun around to answer but he was met with an empty chair and the sound of rustling wings.

As much as it grated on Gordon to follow the advice of the ‘angel’ the simple fact that it knew about the base was reason to move. As soon as he was back in his car Gordon called his people to tell them to start packing. Discretely. If there was some sort of raid planned then any obvious activity would only accelerate the attack. By the time Gordon hit Tennessee the place was half packed. By the time he hit Mississippi he was driving ninety miles an hour with one of the other ‘instructors’ riding shotgun in more than one sense of the word as they barreled through the onslaught. There were creatures mixed in here and there and Gordon recognized the signs that they were being controlled by a witch, but the vast majority had eyes black as pitch.

They lost two of the benefactors and one instructor. A trainee lost both legs. The spouse of another lost an eye. Lots of weaponry, half the cars, the majority of what passed for their library.

Things that belonged to people they lost.

They ran.

When they regrouped everyone was raw. It was a comfort that they were able to get all of the dead out, however small of a comfort it was. As he was The First Hunter in this ragtag organization Gordon took it upon himself to salt and burn the corpses while the rest tended to the wounded and took stock of what was lost. There was a time when the smell of burning meat upset something primal in Gordon Ramsay, but that time was long past. He laughed with dark humor at how heavily he had salted the steaks, then the noise strangled in his throat and he silently apologized to the empty charred meat and to the people who used to own it.

When he rejoined the others one of the older hunters told everyone that it could have been a lot worse if they didn’t have warning, and to be grateful for that. It was a wan comfort, but it was okay, because Gordon could do better.

“How long do you think it took them to round up all those creatures?” he said to the grizzled woman who spoke of warnings, but he said it loud enough for everyone to hear. “Witches aren’t my usual hunt so correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t it take the better part of a month just to get enough of a leash to trust it won’t eat them? How long does it take to get that many demons in one place, for their general to scare them into compliance?”

She stared at him. There wasn’t any noise aside from the crickets and the crackle of the dying fire.

“They did it because we’re dangerous. They did it because they’re _scared_. One of the biggest weaknesses we hunters have always had and don’t any of you try to deny it is that we’re scattered. It was all right before everything went to noise, but now? Fighting together is the only way we’re going to make enough of a stand to fight this.”

Gordon grinned the sort of grin you earned in a hunter’s life. It was horror and agony but outshining all of that was an insane defiance and a drive to kick some god damn ass.

He saw it answered in the faces around him. His grin got wider.

“They went after us because we’re dangerous, and by god, I plan to keep on being dangerous.”

There was a failed hotel in Texas that their benefactors had been looking at as a possible third base. It was set up on what used to be a ranch, far enough away from city centers that they could keep their going ons secret but close enough that it wouldn’t be a hassle to drive for supplies. It wasn’t a huge place so far as hotels went but it was more that big enough to make into a boot camp for hunters. The stone and steel construction was sturdy, there were thirty-two rooms in total, a sizeable basement, three conference rooms, and what might have once been meant to be a spa attached to the pool. The people who built it made it far bigger than they were ever going to get business to pay, thus why it was on the market and waiting to be repurposed into something that trained people to handle a lot of blood.

Gordon found himself standing in the kitchen. Nothing was polished until it gleamed, there were deposits of grease in the corners by the half-disassembled fry station, and a layer of dust had settled on everything. Once he took in the state of the place Gordon was able to breathe easier; while the small, buried part of him that wanted to be a chef was having a fit over how filthy the place was the rest of him found it easier to disconnect what he was seeing from the image of the counters slick with blood. There was no shining steel to be seen. He could manage.

The only reason why he was in there is because they wanted to get a cafeteria set up as soon as possible and no one else knew one end of an industrial kitchen from another. So Gorgon paced around and one of the hunters’ daughters scurried around behind him and wrote down everything he said they would need to fix. She seemed to like him since she got to hear a whole new country of swearing. Gordon was in the middle of yelling at the long gone kitchen staff for the mess he found behind a proofer—being sure to use a lot of words like bollocks and bugger since it made the girl giggle—until her aunt arrived with a pair of old overalls and told the girl to get changed so she could help paint traps and wards. 

After the girl ran off to the broken walk-in cooler to change, the aunt gave Gordon this look here was a look that made it clear that she knew how Gordon got started. It was basic hunter etiquette that you never ask someone how they got into the business because those stories always ended in death and pain. Because of that Gordon didn’t know how most of the people currently scurrying around the hotel got started killing monsters, but unfortunately most of them knew about him. He had long accepted that it was a hazard of being the first hunter in their rag tag confederacy; hunters wanted to know what the investors were doing before they signed up. Gordon just happened to share his story with most of those investors. So there was understanding in her eyes, and the sort of camaraderie hunters shared even if they hated each other, and a touch of pity she would deny was there and that Gordon would ignore.

The aunt gave Gordon a rundown on what progress everyone was making and collected the girl’s excellent job of decoding angry ranting into useful information. When the girl came out of the walk-in she enthusiastically told her aunt about all the new words and phrases she had learned. Gordon actually winced when the girl recited back a particularly graphic slur describing the theoretical and less that favorable parentage of the chef who managed to lose an entire sauté pan under an oven. The aunt raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. If a kid spent any amount of time around hunters she was going to pick up a few coarser bits of language anyway. A kid who spent a lot of time around hunters didn’t usually have all that many reasons to giggle, either, and her aunt seemed to be the type to realize that was a bad thing and so refused to take away the girl’s enjoyment of creative British insults.

Gordon tried to remember the aunt’s name and came up empty. He thought about a couple moments in the fight to get out of Mississippi when it would have been helpful to shout a directed warning and not just a general order to get down. They had been targeted because they were organized and that made them more dangerous, but they still weren’t dangerous enough.

“Your name starts with an ‘R’, right?”

He was shaken from his thoughts and looked at the woman. She smiled that sort of look you only see on a long time hunter. Amazing how people in the life thought of themselves as anti-social when they could practically read each other’s minds.

“Ramsay.” He stuck his hand out and they shared an awkward handshake. “Gordon Ramsay.”

“I’m Heather Morris.” She pointed at the girl who had the look of someone trying not to speak lest they break the spell of the moment. “This is Emily.”

“We need to fix this,” Gordon found himself saying. “Not just,” he gestured to the whole of the broken down dusty kitchen, “but how we do things. We made ourselves a target by banding together but we didn’t take it far enough.”

“We need to be a team!” Emily burst out brightly. “We should have a name, like superheroes do.”

Gordon looked at Heather with an eyebrow raised; he didn’t know how she managed to keep her niece this happy with the life they led but whatever it was it was working. He couldn’t remember the last time he saw a hunter kid so well adjusted. Or badly adjusted, depending on your point of view. Gordon wondered when he changed so much that he would find it a good thing when a barely pubescent child could giggle after watching blood fly. He was always one of the philosophical types of hunters.

“Might not be a bad idea,” he mused. “Give us a sense of unity, maybe.”

“Stand together since it’s clear that’s what our enemies are doing?” Heather asked. “I’m not sure if everyone is ready for that. We’ve worked alone for too long.”

“What about just this place to start?” Emily pouted. “It was boring calling it ‘The Mississippi Base’. Can’t we be more creative with this one?”

“Perhaps you have a point, young lady.”

The three of them all spun to face the new voice, Heather and Emily both with weapons in hand. Gordon had started to reach for his but in that split second he had recognized the voice. It was Neil Klein, one of the patrons of their merry band of murderers. He was next in line to be butchered and had already watched them slaughter his husband and three-year-old daughter by the time Gordon bumbled his way into killing the three pagan gods. Of the investors Neil was the only one who took up the salt and stake as well as laying down his pocketbook. Man was damn quiet when he wanted to be.

Heather and Emily stood down as soon as they saw who it was. Awkward silence, a staple of any conversation between acquaintance hunters, fell over the room. Gordon knew full well that the difficulties he had going into kitchens had to be a pale shade of what Neil went through; Gordon hadn’t lost anyone he loved on that gory night. Neil’s jaw was wet and his hands clenched, twitching towards the knife strapped to his hip. At last he cracked a grin only seen on hunters and serial killers and with an almost humorless chuckle made his suggestion.

“Texas... I’m not from around here, but I heard something once about one of their settler days major players saying something about how if he had a place in Texas and in Hell he’d rent out Texas and live in Hell. So, what about Hell’s Kitchen?”

Hunters are gossipy cows and considering that a bubbly little girl was involved the whole camp knew about the exchange before the night was up. For one reason or another the name ended up sticking. The other base in Nevada decided that tasteless jokes were a good idea and named themselves DMH after a dead man’s hand. Figuring out a name for the growing organization as a whole was a little tougher and the matter remained tabled while most of the focus was on keeping everyone from killing each other before the demons even got a shot. Trying to get everyone moving towards working together as a more cohesive team wasn’t easy. There was friction, and yelling matches, and a few punches thrown. But for the most part the hunters realized that, whether they liked it or not, this was their best chance of survival. So there was grumbling—sometimes the type of grumbling which caused broken noses—but for the most part things were moving about as smoothly as they could possibly go.

It was a couple months after the ‘move’ and Gordon was standing on the roof looking out at the night sky. Hell’s Kitchen was doing all right. There were devil’s traps in every conceivable place and a few inconceivable places too, wards for everything they could think of and a few they made up as they went, and they had been drilling to make any future ‘move’ a lot smoother and with a lot less blood on their side of the knife. Gordon didn’t feel safe there—no hunter ever truly felt safe—but he felt safer than he had in a long time. He could see why the demons wanted to nip this little venture in the bud, though ironically their attack only served to strengthen the organization’s resolve. The Kitchen and DMH weren’t going down without a fight, and the demons were learning that lesson the hard way.

“I must say, I’m almost very nearly—“

This time the knife ended up in Balthazar’s chest instead of his hand. The bastard didn’t even flinch.

“—impressed with how you lot handled that. I honestly thought that at least half of you would have ended up meat paste or meat suits.”

“Now comes the part where you tell me what the fuck your game is,” Gordon growled. Balthazar rolled its eyes, removed the knife from its chest, and handed the blade back to the hunter handle first. For lack of anything better to do, Gordon took it. The blood on it was red, human, but the wound wasn’t bleeding anywhere near as much as it should be. Gordon had seen the same thing in demons; even when they possessed a corpse the blood would move through the veins, but even in a freshly caught living host the flow was sluggish. Gordon didn’t know if it was some side effect of having two souls in the same body, or if it was a result of whatever held together their hosts far past the point of human endurance, or maybe the demons just corrupted the flesh they wore out of spite. Between the wound and the way Balthazar had know about the raid things were pointing demonic, except Gordon knew that the building had been trapped to oblivion. They had wards that would shut out the most powerful demons, and even if they found a way to get through it wouldn’t be easy for them. Popping up on the roof like that—had there been that odd sound of rustling feathers again or not—it should have been impossible for a demon.

Then Balthazar slid its hand across the cut and it healed. Again, nothing a demon couldn’t do though Gordon had never seen anything heal that fast and that clean, but he had never heard of a demon who could knit fabric back together like new. The shirt was free of blood and not so much as a single frayed thread betrayed where the knife had sliced through.

Faced with the idea of being alone on a rooftop with something more powerful than the most powerful demon or demigod he had ever seen, Gordon decided he liked the demon idea better. If he was lucky then the thing’s powers only extended to trivial things like fixing clothing, but then if luck always went his way he wouldn’t have been a hunter in the first place.

Whatever the thing was it clearly had the ability to kill Gordon faster than he could even think about calling for help, so the hunter fell into the calm of the truly fucked. Gordon had no defense against this creature and worrying about it wasn’t going to help him any, so he just didn’t think about it and focused everything he had on figuring out what was going on.

“Forgive me if I’m a little suspicious,” and maybe it would have been a good idea to cut back on the sarcasm but Gordon was past the point of caring, “but I doubt that you helped us out of the goodness of your heart.”

Balthazar seemed subtly pleased with the hunter’s biting tone; Gordon guessed that it was the type that preferred the honesty of hostility over lies of niceties for the sake of survival. Well, he could deliver on that.

“As I told you before, this whole end of the world mess makes it difficult to travel,” Balthazar answered with a shrug.

“Right, right, and you’re an _angel_. Sure.”

“Lay it on a little thicker, dear, I might not get that you’re being sarcastic.”

Gordon progressed to the point of rubbing his forehead in exasperation. “Oh my god, what did I do to deserve this?”

“Hey, watch taking Dad’s name in vain,” Balthazar chided, though he didn’t sound all that serious about it.

“Okay, fine,” Gordon mumbled, deciding that until he figured out what this thing was he couldn’t count ‘angel’ out. Could be a long buried creature that got adopted into Christian mythology along with demons even if it wasn’t an angel as was defined by stained glass windows and sermons. “So how does this ‘angel’ business work?”

“Excuse me?”

Gordon threw his hands up. “I’m trying to figure out what you _are_ , for fuck’s sake. Mythology leaves a lot of gaps and gets a lot more completely wrong so just telling me you’re an angel isn’t going to tell me much.”

“Calm down or else your frail little heart is going to give out,” Balthazar huffed as he sat on the wall running along the edge of the roof. “I am a collection of supernatural will and intent. Your mind couldn’t comprehend what I really am, and while that might sound like an insult—okay, maybe it was, just a little—it’s really just fact. A dog’s brain can’t understand color, a slug’s brain can’t understand language, and a human’s pathetic brain isn’t built to understand what an angel really is.”

“So when you said that it would blind me or kill me if you showed me your wings, you weren’t joking?”

“Precisely!”

Gordon was of the opinion that Balthazar was enjoying this far too much, but at least the thing was still talking.

“Give it to me in something my pathetic human brain can understand. What can you do? What’s your goal here?” Gordon’s eyes narrowed as a thought occurred. “Wait... if you’re a collection of will, then what am I looking at?”

There was a guarded look on Balthazar’s face, not one of dishonesty but of someone who knows where the conversation is going and isn’t pleased with it. “This is a vessel.”

“So, you’re possessing some poor sod.” Gordon’s hand twitched towards the slim box of salt in his pocket. 

“How about we just skip to the end— _I am not a demon_.”

Gordon froze. There was power behind that, something like rumbling thunder or heat or cold or _something_ he couldn’t quite name, even though Balthazar’s voice never rose above a seething whisper. The hunter found it a little easier to believe that he would be incapable of comprehending this supposed angel’s true form.

Balthazar picked at a piece of invisible lint on his sleeve. “You’re lucky I’m not one of my angrier brothers,” he said mildly. “They don’t always respond so well to being called a demon.”

Whatever it was, Gordon could definitely believe it didn’t like demons.

“For your clarification, hunter, an angel can’t force their way into a human host the way a demon can. We have to ask permission. Without that we are incapable of taking a vessel. It has to be a vessel, too; this is something that runs in the blood.” Balthazar made a careless gesture towards Gordon. “You have a trace—most people do—but it’s not nearly enough to carry even the least powerful of my siblings.”

“Oh, drat, and here I was hoping I’d have angels lining up to wear me to the ball like a rented tux.” Gordon didn’t bother to keep the look of disgust off his face. Any hunter who had ever faced a demon worried about the day that black smoke headed for them, and Ramsay wasn’t sure if these ‘angels’ even manifested in a visible way.

“Pfft. Drama queen,” Balthazar snorted. Gordon glared at it. “Hey, be happy! You still have to worry about demons, of course, but you’ve got your tattoo for that.”

Gordon’s anti-possession tattoo was on his stomach a few inches right of center. Several months back a semi-retired hunter named Singer contacted the group and told them about the ward. Gordon was there, acting as a bodyguard for one of the bookish-no-fight types who went to Singer’s to verify it was good and not a Trojan Horse being handed over by a possessed man. 

He tried to recruit the old hunter, of course. Even if Singer hadn’t been in a wheelchair he was well past his prime for the running and staking part of the job, but he had a wealth of information in his library and in his head. Gordon told him how much his expertise would be appreciated, and sort of edged around the fact that it would be safer for a paralyzed hunter to be around able-bodied friends, but Singer gruffly told him that he had his reasons. Gordon let the matter rest. The lone wolf attitude was well worn and deeply rooted in the hunter community; they got a lot of responses like that. While he didn’t join Singer did send along the occasional care package of information, wards, and charms. Gordon counted it as a step forward; if there was more sharing among the different hunters and hunter groups then the edge the Kitchen and DMH had wouldn’t be so revolutionary and it would save many lives.

There was no way that Gordon’s shirt had ridden up enough for Balthazar to see it. Still, it could just be making a lucky guess based on the extensive wards it would have had to pass by to get to the roof. Thinking about all those wards and the unphased creature standing in front of him gave Gordon indigestion, so he changed the subject.

“So, this ‘vessel’ you’re wearing...” Gordon flicked his fingers at the body standing before him. “Did he know what he was getting into or did you trick him into saying yes?”

Balthazar rolled its eyes—it rolled the eyes of the man it was possessing—and let loose a long suffering sigh. Theatrics aside, it seemed willing to play along for the time being. “A vessel has to know what he’s getting into or it won’t work. It’s not like those spells where any idiot can read words off a page and they have power. If you were a suitable vessel and you jokingly told me that you gave me your permission then I wouldn’t be able to claim you.”

If it did want to take down Hell’s Kitchen and could body jump the way demons did then there was no reason for it to not have taken Gordon already. Some of its story held water, if only some. “So how does that work, then? You just walk up to some sap and sucker them into handing their body over?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

Gordon narrowed his eyes. “Wait... if your ‘true form’ would blind or kill a human then how are you talking to a potential host?”

For some reason this caused Balthazar to laugh. It seemed pleased. “Ah, Cassie, mine is sharper than yours.” It steamrolled over Gordon’s inquiry as to who the fuck this ‘Cassie’ was. “As I said before, being a vessel is in the blood. We can speak to a suitable vessel and it won’t harm them.”

Gordon decided to leave the Cassie line of questioning for later. “So what did you tell this guy? That you were going to rip him out of his life and go around stalking hunters?” Gordon realized that his knife was still in his hand and that said knife had recently been buried in the man’s lung. He winced. A hunter couldn’t afford to think about the host else they hesitate and end up with their throat ripped out, but sometimes they were reminded that there were real people trapped in those meat suits with the black smoke.

“Don’t fret; he’s a laid back guy.”

Gordon blinked. “Excuse me?”

Balthazar looked amused, but sincere. “My host. I can muffle what he can feel, when I can concentrate on it, and he barely felt that at all. He doesn’t hold it against you.”

Gordon laughed. He couldn’t help it. Some extra-unearthly creature was standing there telling him that its human captive didn’t hold a grudge for being stabbed in the chest.

“Perhaps I should come back later,” Balthazar offered.

“No,” Gordon barked. “You stay right there until I understand what the _fuck_ is going on.”

Balthazar raised an eyebrow at being ordered to stay, but he didn’t move or disappear.

Gordon took a few measured breaths and tried to get himself under control. “So tell me then, how did that conversation go? Why would anyone be willing to let a so called angel possess them?”

“Many of them are religious. An angel speaks to them, gives them a miracle or two, tells them they’ll be doing Dad’s work.”

“And are they?”

Balthazar looked at him blankly.

Gordon clarified. “Are they doing God’s work?”

It rubbed its mouth. “That is the question, is it not? Heaven is... complicated.”

“I’ll bet it is. So what work of God are you doing standing here?”

“I’m not.”

They stood there staring at each other for several long seconds. Finally, Gordon broke the silence. “I’m not really sure if that’s a point in your favor or against you.”

Balthazar was starting to look subtly agitated. “I left, all right? Whatever political mess is going on upstairs, well, I’m no longer a part of it. I wasn’t lying when I told you that the whole mess made travel a pain, you know. If I could still pop up back to the clouds it wouldn’t be so much of a hassle but I have to keep a low profile, you see.”

It wasn’t completely unheard of for a hunter to run into a runaway demon. One who clawed their way out of the pit and instead of doing the bidding of their generals they just tuck themselves away in some remote corner and live a quiet life. It used to be incredibly rare—whatever was twisted in a demon’s mind didn’t let them sit quietly when there were throats to be slit—but as of late... Whatever was causing this uprising didn’t sit right with all the demons. They felt it was too big of a risk, for whatever reason, and deserted. If there was some opposing angelic force it would make sense for some of them to be against the fighting too. Every family had the outliers.

The real question was if Gordon was going to believe the supposed outlier standing in front of him.

“So who says yes to a fallen angel?”

“ _Runaway_ , thank you.” Gordon thought he saw it shudder. “I didn’t _fall_.”

“Whatever. Why did he say yes to you? Did you lie and say it was God’s work—does it work like that? Was he crazy, or—“

“I told him I was a runaway angel, that the world was going to hell, and that I was here to have as much fun as I could before everything turned to ashes.”

There was really no reason for Gordon to believe a word coming out of this thing’s stolen mouth, but he found it hard to doubt. Something in the tone, the way it was standing... Gordon felt it was the truth.

“Why did he agree?” Gordon carefully ventured.

“Because he was dying. Suicide. I found him after he chased a couple bottles of pills with a couple bottles of vodka.”

Gordon clamped down on his response to that, asking if Balthazar took advantage of eleventh hour regrets, but it must have showed on his face. A flash of annoyance crossed Balthazar’s eyes, but it faded quickly.

“His life was crap. He didn’t even have the luxury of having fun. So I told him the state of the world and that I planned to be as hedonistic as possible and he said it sounded like a good time.”

Another silence stretched between them. Gordon could feel that this conversation was reaching its end and he wanted his last questions to be the right ones. He needed something, anything, to help him confirm or deny what this creature was saying.

“What was... is. What is his name?”

The corners of the stolen—borrowed?—mouth twitched up. “Sebastian. Sebastian Roché.”

That only left the biggest question, the biggest gap in this story.

“Why...” Gordon took a moment to collect his thoughts, and Balthazar gave it to him. “Given how you reacted to being called a demon I’d hazard to say that angels—whatever you are—don’t get along with them regardless of what politics are going on ‘upstairs’. And this mad scheme we have going on here, it’s at least one of the most dangerous things we have going against the demons, right?”

Balthazar shrugged, then nodded. It once again had that look that it knew where the conversation was going, and this time it was Gordon who wouldn’t like it.

“So, if that’s true... why is it that the only angelic contact we’ve had is a runaway with selfish motivations?”

Its smile was almost pitying. “Because, human, they want this.”

“What?”

“The Apocalypse.”

Gordon blinked, there was a rustling of wings, and when he opened his eyes he was standing alone on and empty roof.

He spent the next week in quarantine while his fellows ran every test they knew. They even invented a few for good measure. It was beyond frustrating, but he knew they needed to do it. The first meeting outside the café could be explained away with a splash of holy water and a silver coin, but this... it had everyone on edge in new and creative ways.

After eight days it was decided that Gordon could leave quarantine, but he had to be escorted everywhere by at least one other hunter and he still had to sleep in a room locked from the outside. As he took a long hot shower he was brought up to speed on what they’d put together while he was, as one of the hunters put it, ‘out of service’. They’d put together some reports of large groups of people fighting each other, some of them clearly demonic and the others unidentified. They dug into reports of devout Christians suddenly becoming more devout shortly before disappearing.

“... some CPA management lawyer type, I don’t know, something with a stupidly long title that meant nothing and required a suit. Name was Kurt Fuller. Coworkers knew he was religious but said he didn’t shove it in their faces until shortly before his disappearance. At first he became withdrawn, not that he was terribly social to begin with, then he started talking about angels, then everything was suddenly back to normal except they say ‘something was wrong in his eyes’ or other vague shit like that. Right up until a clear haunting had problem employees committing ghost-assisted suicide. Not sure who did the salting but the problem was taken care of. The day that was resolved this Fuller guy just vanishes. His body was found way later. Cause of death was being stabbed upwards through the soft part of the jaw straight into the brain with a smooth, conical blade.”

Liam Harvey—good shot, good hunter—was shouting to be heard over the spray. They were in what had once been the employee locker rooms. Gordon was still scrubbing his hair vigorously; the rules of hygiene that came with chef training were deeply engraved and he felt the need to get eight days of grime off his skin more acutely than some would. The curtain had been removed from the stall and Liam leaned against the lockers, annoyed that he got stuck with babysitting duty but no less alert for it. He was reading off of a stack of papers he held in one hand while the other was occupied with a sawed off shotgun full of salt and consecrated iron.

“Then there’s this case from a little further back and _shit_ I left that one with Kiko. Anyway, some dude is happily married with a wife and daughter when he goes off. In the missing persons report there was his wife’s original statement, saying that the guy started talking crazy about an angel in his ear and after he refused to take the pills she got to cure the problem he takes off. Kicker is that he comes _back_. People in the neighborhood reported seeing a man matching his description going to his old house, and the wife called some people to tell them that he was back and to check on them in a while, you know, just in case the guy is still crazy. Then the whole family is gone and there’s clear signs of a struggle in their house with two neighbors complaining of bumps on the head and clear aftereffects of possession.”

Gordon shook the water from his hair and took a half step out of the water. “So what you’re saying is the part of the story about these ‘angels’ using religious hosts adds up.”

“Looks that way, yeah.” Liam adjusted his grip on the shotgun and shuffled the papers around. “Then we come to your friend Sebastian and, well, sounds like that part might have been the honest truth too. This guy has basically had a shitty time all around and for a long time. Long history of suicidal tendencies. He was found next to a few empty bottles and was rushed to get his stomach pumped. Took some digging to get the transcripts, but the paramedics said he was mumbling to someone. Figured it was a hallucination brought on by the drugs, right? Anyway, by the time they get him to the hospital they’re pretty much to the state of thinking that he’s a dead man but they have to at least _try_ to pump his stomach. They only just get the tube down his throat and he sits up, pulls the thing out, and just walks out. Guy was barely breathing, had a pharmacy and a liquor store in his system, and he just leaves.”

“Any history of religion there?”

“Yeah. Well, opposite, in fact. Sort of.”

Gordon rolled his eyes. “I’m aware I’m not in a favorable position to make demands, but for god’s sake, make sense.”

“Fuck you, Ramsay. He was an angry disillusioned Catholic, all right? Got a person who said the guy loved to remind practicing Catholics that being a celibate priest was a family business in the days of castles, shit like that.” Liam looked up, confused. “Why would a guy like that agree to give an angel his body?”

“An angel who told him it was all a joke and that he was going to go party,” Gordon replied. “He probably liked the irony.”

“So... you believe this Balthazar?”

Gordon pointed a dripping finger at Liam. “Don’t give me that tone; you believe it too. It’s stacking up. And believing it isn’t the same as trusting it.”

Liam gave a ‘you have a point’ shrug. “Okay, okay, calm your naked ass down. We’ve got to be paranoid or we won’t be breathing, right?”

“Yes, yes,” Gordon waved him off and went back to furiously attacking his nails with a brush. Soap was wonderful. “I get the feeling you’re saving the worst for last.”

“Ohhhh yeah.” Liam dropped most of his stack on the bench and held up a folder with the words ‘this is fucked’ scrawled across it in permanent marker.

Gordon eyed it warily. “I’m not overly fond of that title.”

Liam waved it at him. “Stop being so damn British. _Anyway_ ,” he flipped it open. “I know you weren’t so much in the demon game before the mess that was the status quo went all unbalanced black-eyed so just to check do you know who Lilith is?”

“... Sounds vaguely familiar, but I can’t place any details. What’s Lilith do?”

“She’s scary as fuck is what she does. I mean, makes most demons look like idiot children throwing mud at windows. You know how the crossroad demons have red eyes, right?”

“And some have yellow, if they’re old and powerful enough.”

Liam leaned forward as though he was divulging top secret information. “She’s full on fucking _white-eyed_. As in, number of even rumored white-eyed demons can be counted on one hand. And she’s definitely the worst of the bunch.”

“Fuck.”

“I love it when you get all Queen’s eloquent on us, Ramsay. But yeah, that about sums it up.”

Gordon vigorously rubbed his face for reasons which had nothing to do with hygiene. “So she’s their ultimate general or—“

“No, no, no,” Liam waved the folder at him again. “See, you’re thinking like she’s not completely and utterly batshit even by the most batshit of demon standards. Lilith is nuts. Creatively nuts. The master of completely and utterly insane.”

Gordon shut the water off—with some regret—and started toweling off. “Is there a point to this somewhere?”

“The point is that Lilith doesn’t really have the capacity, or at least she doesn’t have the interest, to do the day to day wrangling of the hell machine. So, not a general or president or queen or anything. She’s more of a... uh... demon pope.”

That earned Liam a long stare.

“What? That’s seriously as close as I can think of given what we know about her. Ever since activity was on the rise we’ve gotten more of the ‘devout’ demons, the ones who are extra dangerous because they’re actually loyal to something aside from self-interest. Lilith’s one of the oldest demons there is, if not _the_ oldest. She might not have the knack for battlefield strategy or shoving souls around in a constructive manner, but she’s stone cold crazy evil for the sake of being stone cold crazy evil and that makes her like a spiritual leader to these monsters.”

“’Spiritual’, eh?” Gordon tossed the towel down; they’d probably burn it for good measure anyway. “The ones who believe in Lucifer, right?”

“Yeah. No question she was the biggest believer even though the devil has been MIA basically forever. And the ‘religious’ demons say her name almost like a prayer when things get dangerous for them. Like I said, demon pope.”

“Let me guess... she’s in town?”

As Gordon was mostly dry, Liam handed over the file. There were copies of reports and news articles with lots of question marks scrawled in the margin since there was no solid way to say that any one demon was responsible for any of it, but there was a trend. One that made Gordon feel like throwing up even though as is necessary for a hunter he had a very strong stomach. A lot of the incidents seemed to involve a young girl being used as the host; most demons preferred someone at least in their early twenties since it made it easier to move around. A demon pope with an entourage, incredible power, and no capacity for the sense to keep that hidden... that kind of demon could get away with wearing a nine-year-old.

“Just when I think these things can’t surprise me,” Gordon muttered, throwing the file down on the bench in disgust. At least the three monsters who got him started only ate the adults.

“Preeeeetty much.”

“So. This Lilith. She’s on Earth.”

“Well... here’s the kicker...” Liam scratched the back of his neck. “As far as we can tell... she’s dead.”

Gordon did the long stare again.

“Look, not that I particularly believe anything that comes out of a demon’s mouth, but when we started looking and gathering up reports, there were a lot of hunters remembering the creepy murder religious ones saying that Lilith was dead and, well, what good would that do them? If she got sent back below then it wouldn’t make a huge difference to the day to day up here, and even with how creatively evil she was when she was up here it was extra horrible for the town she happened to be in just like any other powerful demon. A little more, maybe, but nothing like the sheer numbers we’ve been seeing everywhere.”

“So it’s not as though saying that it’s dead would be of strategic advantage,” Gordon said. “If we didn’t even realize that she was here to begin with before we really started looking, then there’s not any sense in saying it’s dead to protect it.”

Liam nodded and tossed Gordon some clothes. “You want to know the real scary part? These devoted Lilithees, when they’re talking about her being dead, they’re not sad or pissed or any of that. They’re happy about it.”

Gordon froze, his shirt halfway over his head.

“Yeah. No way that means _anything_ good. Can’t imagine what, but—”

“Sacrifice.”

“Come again?”

Gordon finished getting dressed (snug fit, no shoes, nowhere to hide a weapon) while he thought about what his gut was telling him. When everything was buttoned he spoke slowly and carefully. “Neil Klein and I are the only ones here who specialize in pagans, right?”

Liam scratched his chin. “I think so? I’m witches, got wide streaks of vampires and poltergeists, fair number of demons and growing with how things are going... yeah, I think the two of you are the only ones.”

“And he’s out to the Hand right now so I’m the first one to hear all this.”

“What’s your point?”

Gordon waved his hand dismissively. “Stop with that look; this isn’t me being shifty. This is me thinking aloud. The _point_ is that pagans are the main ones who get heavily into sacrifice, right?”

“Witches can, depending on what kind of magic they’re into. Most of the ‘sacrifice’ is burnt offerings, like the type of magic that hunters get into with burning sage and lavender in a copper bowl. Innocent enough—well, innocent as you can get when you’re talking magic. But I’m guessing that a few plants aren’t what you’re talking about.”

Gordon shook his head. “No, I’m talking blood.”

“There are the ones that just need to be sealed with a little of the caster’s blood—again, the type of stuff that’s acceptable reading material for hunters—but some takes a little more than that. Most of it’s animals. Rabbits, dogs, goats, that sort of thing. Not all those spells are _bad_ , necessarily, but when you get into books full of gutting small animals it’s not exactly made for your friendly neighborhood medium, you know? Bigger and smarter the animal is, the more powerful the spell.”

“Part of why a lot of the pagan ‘gods’ wanted sacrifice wasn’t just liking how human flesh tastes. There is that, sure, but a lot of it is that they can absorb someone’s life force through the crutch of eating their meat. That’s why it’s so incredibly rare to find a ghost of one of their victims even though they’re perfect candidates for the kind of sudden, violent death to leave them wanting vengeance; there’s just nothing left to haunt. It all gets digested when the god eats them.”

Liam made a face. “Sense to that. If the body wasn’t a focus for the spirit then burning the bones wouldn’t do anything to a ghost.” It was his turn to stare at Gordon. “What are you getting at?”

Gordon sat down and ran his hands through his wet hair. If he was right then the implications... he didn’t want to think about it. “What I’m getting at is that a willing sacrifice, while harder to come by, is a lot better for those monsters. Les resistance, less fighting, more of the soul stays intact.”

“Veal versus some tougher steak from an old cow?”

“Yes, precisely.”

Liam was starting to look a little pale. “So... you’re saying that maybe they’re happy because she went willingly? Because she was part of some spell with a sacrifice?”

“What could kill something that powerful and that well protected unless it fell on the sword itself?”

“Shit,” Liam muttered. “Shit, fuck, no fucking way I do not have the fucking energy for this—“

“Balthazar _said_ the apocalypse,” Gordon kept going miserably. “Maybe he didn’t just mean a catastrophe but the actual biblical Apocalypse. That means hell on earth, and _literally_. What else would an insane, devout Satan worshiper sacrifice herself to?”

It was quiet aside from the drip from the recently used faucet.

“You’re telling them,” Liam said at last. “You’re the tea-swilling fucknuts who’s making sense. I’m... I’m _not_ going to tell them.”

“Fair enough,” Gordon replied weakly.

It wasn’t a particularly pleasant conversation, especially since Gordon was still under suspicion of being influenced by the creature who called itself Balthazar. It wasn’t an unreasonable suspicion by any means and Gordon was well aware of that, but it didn’t make it any less infuriating to have his every thought questioned from every possible angle. It was no surprise to him when he ended up losing his temper and began peppering his defense with insults. If the discussion had been a steak then by the end of it the thing would have been beyond over-peppered. Gordon’s logical arguments dwindled to nothing and his insults turned more and more foul until it turned into a three-way shouting match between Gordon, Neil Klein, and a vampire based hunter named Jenny Powell. Neil had become the spokesperson for those who didn’t believe Gordon’s theory, Jenny took up the mantle for those who saw truth in it. It started out as an actual debate with a side of swearing but turned into mostly swearing pretty quickly. Hunters had spent their whole ‘careers’ being rubbed raw and that didn’t make for particularly long fuses.

Marginally cooler heads broke the three of them apart before it could come to anything more than screaming. Neil had been one of the people Gordon had an easier time with, what with coming from a shared nightmare made real, but he refused to even be in the same building after Gordon gave his little presentation. After a few days Neil came back only to stare Gordon in the eyes for a long minute before stalking off to parts unknown. Gordon sat there in silence when it happened. He knew what a betrayal this had to be to Neil. They weren’t close by any normal measure but by the standards of hunters... two men don’t walk out of a room painted red by liters of blood and fail to form some kind of bond. Now Gordon was compromised, he was taken, at least, that’s how Neil saw it. He lost his first ally.

According to hunter tradition, Gordon was extraordinarily social. By the standards of normal human beings he was a maladjusted loner, but that was a yardstick which hadn’t applied to him in a long time. From the beginning of his hunting career he had people back ‘home’, he had a network, and he always had one hunter who he could trust to have his back if he really needed the extra help.

Gordon hadn’t been abandoned or condemned by the group by any means. For one thing, his theory made a lot of sense, something which no one was happy about. He was under close supervision and if he tried to leave the Kitchen then they’d nail him with a tranq, but it would be a tranq dart and not a lead bullet. Or iron. He wouldn’t put it past them to use consecrated iron if he did lose it—something which Gordon had not discounted as a possibility. But even though the group as a whole hadn’t given up on him Neil had. Gordon was friendlier with more hunters and hunter hang-ons than he could count on two hands than he was with Neil, the two men were not close by any means, and it hurt like a son of a bitch to see the look of disgust in Neil’s eyes when he walked out. There was also a more general resentment towards him for his sin of being the first to put it together, something which fluctuated wildly as they were able to line up more and more acts pointing to Lucifer rising being the answer to why the world had quite literally gone to hell. And Gordon was stuck in Hell’s Kitchen unable to do so much as stake something and he was quickly losing his mind and the hold on his temper.

Unsurprisingly, as the days passed Gordon’s hatred for Balthazar grew and grew.

The next time the creature appeared Gordon punched him in the nose and nearly broke his hand.

“Really? I mean honestly?” Balthazar asked mildly while Gordon was putting everything he had into not letting the pain show. He was somewhat successful.

“Fucking soul sucking shit!”

Balthazar looked impressed. “Oh, finally the claws come out. You have been spectacularly controlled and, well, boring.”

Gordon couldn’t kill with a glare the way a couple of monsters could, but he sure could try. “During our previous conversations I was playing it safe while trying to figure out what the fuck you are.”

“And now you’ve figured out what I am and have dropped the pretense?”

“I’ve dropped the pretense because _I don’t care anymore_. I’m constantly watched, I’m confined to the fucking Kitchen—“

Balthazar rolled its eyes. “What is it with hunters and your collectively bad sense of humor?”

“—and no one here trusts me anymore because they don’t know if I’ve been trussed up into a mouthpiece for an unknown entity with unknown powers!”

“Do you feel better for the shouting?”

Gordon did feel a little better for the shouting, not that he’d admit to such a childish comfort when faced with something looking at him like it though he was a toddler. “I would feel _better_ if I knew _why_.”

“Ah, and which ‘why’ would that be?”

Gordon paced the suite he’d claimed as his own, all too aware of how much he felt like a caged animal. He didn’t bother to ask why the door hadn’t been broken down by his keepers; given everything else the creature had done it would be no surprise if it could soundproof a room or make the door impenetrable. “Why would you warn us? What’s going on with the demons? Is there any truth at all to the Lucifer rising theory?”

Balthazar rolled its eyes again. Gordon knew from recent and painful experience that punching the creature would get him nothing but sore knuckles, but his hands still itched to pound that smug look off the thing’s stolen face. It took a nonchalant step forward which infuriated Gordon even more; it just went to show how little of a threat he was to Balthazar.

“All I’m hearing is static. Why don’t you as the real question, hm?”

Gordon grit his teeth. “And what do you think this _real_ question is?”

Balthazar leaned forward and held out his hand in what might have been a gesture of solidarity or comfort if it had been two humans talking. “The real question is: why me?”

It refused to break eye contact, staring Gordon down until he buckled under the truth of it. Gordon fought it but in the end he had to admit that Balthazar was right. Questions Gordon about the end of the world ranked lower than the one asking why Balthazar had chosen _his_ life to ruin.

“All right,” Gordon ground out. “Out with it then. Why did it have to be me?”

Infuriatingly, Balthazar shrugged. “You seemed as good a choice as any.”

“ _Bollocks!_ ”

“Oh, so British! You’re giving me tingles.”

Gordon suppressed the urge to groan and slap his forehead. The unearthly creature was _not_ possibly flirting with him. He was not going to even admit the possibility.

“If it makes you feel any better, I flirt with pretty much everything.”

Gordon glared, then parsed through that sentence, and then glared harder. “Don’t tell me, you’ve—“

“I can read your surface thoughts, yes, get over it,” Balthazar rolled its eyes dramatically.

“Can you turn that particular ability the fuck off?”

Balthazar started to shake its head, but aborted the gesture and did another of those lazy hands-in-the-pockets shrugs. “I _can_ , but it takes effort and that’s for angels who start to get attached.”

There was weight to that statement, and Gordon remembered the offhand comments Balthazar had made about ‘Cassie’. Under the breath, annoyed mutterings. Gordon wasn’t sure about the naming conventions of these so called angels but he’d be willing to bet that Cassie was a nickname, meaning that one of Balthazar’s fellows had fallen in with humans and Balthazar wasn’t too happy about it.

The creature quirked an eyebrow. “Gold star.”

It was condescending, as had been every word out of the creature’s stolen mouth, but Gordon thought he could detect a hint of impressed. He wanted to find out more about this Cassie, particularly since it was implied that Balthazar had adopted Gordon to mimic whatever Cassie was doing and that meant that some fool human was consorting with one of these things. Gordon quickly pushed that question away. Even if Balthazar did answer truthfully it wouldn’t do Hell’s Kitchen much good. He needed to focus on his own before he worried about some idiot running around with a supernatural creature.

“So... British,” Gordon changed the subject awkwardly, well aware that Balthazar had ‘heard’ his whole thought process. It didn’t argue. Gordon wondered what the mind-reading rules were about getting offended by things unspoken. “I can’t quite place your accent; is that an angel thing?”

Balthazar looked amused. “Not really. My vessel was French but he grew up all over. But then again if he was speaking directly to you he wouldn’t sound quite like I do. Different cadence, different manner.”

Gordon had seen that sort of thing happen when the same demon took a different host—Balthazar frowned but said nothing, and if there was one thing Gordon could believe about its story then it would be that Balthazar did not like demons—and it did make sense.

“Can he take it back?” Gordon blurted. Balthazar looked confused. “Your... what did you call him, vessel? You said you needed permission. Can he take it back?”

Balthazar stared him down long and hard before finally speaking. “No. Once we’re in we can stay as long as we like. If we leave we can’t come back without again receiving permission.”

Gordon had hoped that anyone who was tricked into handing the keys over to one of these things would have a way out—assuming Balthazar was even telling the truth—but no dice.

“Not that you’ll believe me, but Sebastian here,” Balthazar pointed to its—Sebasitan’s—head, “is still fine with having a flatmate. My regenerative powers which you saw firsthand when you stabbed me—rude—also take care of pesky toxins so we can throw back drink after drink and never black out. We can bar hop across continents in a single night. No refectory period, either, unless I tone back the angelic stamina.”

The waggled of its eyebrows was not necessary, in Gordon’s opinion. He resolutely stayed on track. “And he’s awake for all this?”

“All vessels have some awareness of what’s going on. An angel can choose to pull their consciousness forward or push it back, but it takes some exertion. I always wake him up for the fun; that was part of the deal we struck when he said yes.”

It still didn’t sit right with Gordon, of course, but there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot he could do for the man. Besides, Balthazar’s story wasn’t exactly unbelievable; calls to people who knew this Roche told the story of a jaded, bitter, miserable man who alternated between shouting at the world and destructive partying and drug use.

Gordon moved on.

“Every word you’ve said about the human race has been insulting, yet you don’t seem to mind Sebastian all that much. Why is that?”

Balthazar laughed. “You see, Sebs hates humanity too. That’s why we get along so famously.” It waved Roché’s hand dismissively. “Feel free not to believe me—that’s your privilege as a human—but I am actually quite amiable with humans compared to most of my brothers.”

Gordon had a few choice words to say about that but he bit back his retort; he’d been in the game long enough and had heard enough otherworldly creatures talk about humanity to know it was true. The ones who liked the toys humanity produced were generally as ‘good’ as it got. 

“So,” he said instead, “the question still remains: what the fuck do you want with us?”

“I do _love_ spiky monkeys.” It shrugged again. “An experiment. Your little party is different from the way most hunters operate and that intrigues me. Only a little, mind, but still... consider my interest piqued. It’s a little experiment in comparing and contrasting effectiveness.”

“Between Cassie’s team and yours?”

Gordon fell into a defensive stance on instinct at the surge of intangible fury that swept over him. Like static but not quite static, like a ghosts’ cold pocket without the temperature variance and a whole hell of a lot worse, it was the feeling a human got when standing very close to a very old, very angry thing with far more raw power than any member of mankind could ever hope to fully comprehend. 

After an eternity that only lasted a second the feeling dissipated and the so-called angel’s stolen face snapped back to the careless expression it seemed to be fond of. Gordon wondered if that was something inherited from the host or if it belonged solely to the creature.

“Your warding on the northwest corner isn’t as strong as it needs to be,” was Balthazar’s reply, the flat tone not quite matching the casual expression. “I’ll be seeing you.”

Gordon blinked, nothing more than a twitch, and once again there was the sound of rustling wings. When Gordon opened his eyes Balthazar was gone. In the next instant the door came away from the frame in splinters and three hunters burst into the room. Gordon sighed and shook his head.

“I need a bloody drink.”

Balthazar’s third visit didn’t help things much for Gordon even though its comment about the warding turned out to be true, however, it did help when it started appearing to other members of the Kitchen. It never engaged creatures directly, but hunters reported seeing it burning devil’s traps into ground and disappearing before the demons came in sight of it, scribing other wards with a snap of its fingers, providing distractions by making doorways appear or disappear, that sort of thing. It passed along information on the movement of their prey and instructions on sigils and spells long forgotten. Direct intervention wasn’t the usual M.O., but it happened often enough and to enough people who were not Gordon for the others to stop being as suspicious of him. They still didn’t trust the thing, not really, but they at least trusted that Gordon wasn’t under a spell and wasn’t a plant. It was just as Balthazar said; Gordon was a handy starting point. Despite all the usual and well justified hunter paranoia there was still a sizeable chunk who had never believed that Gordon was compromised. His word would be stronger and his reputation would recover quicker than that of a green or otherwise unreliable hunter.

Hell’s Kitchen came to accept Balthazar. Not trust, it would take a lot more than good information for any hunter to fully trust a monster however beneficial the creature might seem to be, but they did accept that the so called angel was helping them in their fight against the demonic onslaught, that the hatred it felt for demons was a hell of a lot deeper and stronger than its distain for the human race, but above all the hunters and support of Hell’s Kitchen and D.M.H. accepted that they were desperate. They needed all the help they could get, whatever the source, because otherwise they were going to be overrun. Demons were taking small towns in force, they were getting more and more brazen when it came to their excursions into larger cities, and it showed no signs of stopping anytime soon. So, they accepted.

It was a few months after the feelings of acceptance had settled and Gordon was in the middle of being especially careful in cleaning up after a vampire nest. It had been right in the middle of the clubbing district of a city big enough to have a public transit system. The other things that went bump in the night didn’t seem to be enjoying the same insane boost in power and numbers that the demons did, but the rise in possessed violence meant fewer hunters stretched thinner and in the chaos other types of monsters were growing more and more bold. Gordon had a bandanna tied over his mouth and was vigorously spraying the scene down with bleach. He’d seen a decent number of strays on his way into the nest and while animals didn’t turn the same way humans did after consuming vampire blood it did do bad things to them, and they in turn did bad things to any other thing that crossed their paths. It increased his chances of being caught but Gordon would rather take that chance than have the possibility of some dumb kid being mauled living on his conscious. Or, for that matter, the possibility of a stray animal being put down as rabid. There was a certain amount of collateral damage associated with hunting that could not be avoided but there was also a lot that could, and Gordon tried to minimize the trauma wherever possible.

The sound of the sprayer must have covered the sound of rustling feathers because Gordon didn’t realize that Balthazar was there until the creature stepped in his line of vision.

“ _You fucking idiot!_ ” Gordon shouted before remembering that he was standing in a room full of blood-splatter and seemingly human corpses and dropped his voice to a hiss. “You don’t sneak up on a bloody _hunter_ under any circumstances.”

Balthazar looked down at the knife hilt sticking out from just under the borrowed body’s collarbone. “I can see that,” the angel stated mildly.

Gordon glared and held out his hand expectantly. Balthazar stared blankly. Gordon tilted his head back in frustration and then stomped the half-step closer, pulling the knife from Balthazar’s chest himself. He started to wipe the blade off on his jeans before realizing that it was already clean. He almost asked the angel of the metaphysics of that or the complete lack of wound or torn shirt on Balthazar’s part, but stopped himself. It wasn’t his area of expertise, he was far too tired, and he probably wouldn’t have been able to comprehend it in any case.

“So where were you, then?” Gordon asked instead, gesturing to the mess of bodies they were practically knee deep in.

Balthazar shrugged carelessly. “You had it well in hand. And the club bunnies I stopped from coming in here for a good snog might have thrown a wrench in your cunning plan of riding in guns blazing.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” Gordon grit out through his teeth. He assumed that the angel would be able to read his mind and sense the gratitude buried under the irritation. Unexpected bystanders were the last thing any hunter needed when going in for the kill. “Now, if you’ll excuse me I have a bit of a mess... to...”

Gordon had blinked, or maybe even only turned his head, and suddenly the room was devoid of any trace of bodies or blood. Gordon shook his head but the room was still clean. Well, as clean as any abandoned building got.

“Where the fuck did they go?”

“Active volcano,” Balthazar replied in a bored tone.

“I... thank you?” Gordon wasn’t great at gratitude, particularly to otherworldly creatures, but cleanup was a pain and while he’d long since beat out the instinct to vomit at the sight and smell of a bloody room it still set him on edge. The adrenaline rush from being startled was wearing off and Gordon was finally able to really look at Balthazar. The angel wore the same clothes and body as he always had, but something seemed off. Balthazar seemed... distracted. Sad, even. It didn’t fit any moment of any other encounter between the two and Gordon was instantly on guard. 

“What?” Balthazar snapped. “Just because we angels don’t need sleep doesn’t mean we can’t be tired from time to time.”

Gordon didn’t believe that it was that simple, but he dropped the matter for the moment. “Have you anything else for us?”

Balthazar nodded. “Back to your hotel room. I’ll mark a few points of interest on your map.”

That didn’t ring true either, as Balthazar could just snap his fingers and make any mark he wanted appear on any map, but Gordon didn’t press it. In the same way he got that indefinable sense of Balthazar’s power Gordon had a feeling in his gut that something very serious and very major was happening. He didn’t have a clue as to what that was, but he figured that Balthazar hadn’t steered them wrong yet. As he finished packing up his weaponry and cleanup supplies it occurred to him that if Balthazar was going to turn on Hell’s Kitchen it would make sense that he’d end it where he started, but Gordon brushed the thought aside. He’d reasonably come to terms with how out of his depth he was with the angel, and if Balthazar was going to turn on them there wasn’t going to be much Gordon could do about it. It gave him a strange sense of peace, and the hunter didn’t even comment when Balthazar fell into step just a little behind him.

The ratty hotel wasn’t far. Gordon wasn’t used to staying in a place with an elevator—the hunter’s usual fare was cheap motels on the outskirts of small towns, not five story numbers in the middle of what was barely above a city slum—but for all its rattiness it was the only place Gordon could find with a kitchenette at a reasonable price. As soon as he had the door locked and his gear stowed Gordon immediately went to the little fridge and started piling ingredients in the sink for lack of counter space once the cutting board was out. While Gordon was doing that Balthazar had wandered around the room, finally settling down at the table covered in the usual research. Gordon glanced over and saw his guest passing his hand over his U.S. roadmap and felt an accompanying prickle of energy in the air Balthazar didn’t seem to be inclined to go even after completing this task, though.

“Would you...” Gordon could hardly believe the words coming out of his mouth, particularly with his experience with creatures and cooking, but he forced the sentence out. “Would you like to stay for supper?”

Balthazar looked surprised, which surprised Gordon in turn. Given the angel’s apparent mind-reading abilities he didn’t know that surprise was possible. At length, Balthazar nodded and Gordon turned back to the cutting board and frying pan. He didn’t have much in his little fridge, just a little something to be a post-hunt victory meal, but it would be enough for two smaller portions. The two of them remained silent until the sizzle of caramelizing onions filled the small room.

“You cook?”

Gordon glanced over his shoulder. Balthazar was still just sitting there, idly toying with a pencil. “I _am_ a cook, under it all.” Gordon laughed without humor and turned back to the mushrooms he was slicing. “Used to be, in any case.” There was a pause with only the sound of the knife tapping against the cutting board. “Wouldn’t you know that?”

“While I could go through your head and learn all there is to learn and then some, I haven’t.” Balthazar said, a touch annoyed. “I can’t help but hear surface thoughts. Diving in is another story.”

“Ah.” Gordon tried to think of the last conversation he’d had this awkward, painfully aware that Balthazar would be aware of the thought. “That’s interesting.”

They managed to hold off on any more stilted conversation until Gordon was shoving all the papers and books off to the bed and setting down two plates of chicken marsala. Poultry was the only land-borne meat Gordon could stand to cook with as the inciting incident of his hunting career had put Gordon off red meat for good. Real red meat, at least; the processed beef at Arby’s or Taco Bell was far enough away from a rare human steak in texture that it didn’t bother him. It occurred to Gordon that even if Balthazar hadn’t gone digging he had to have known the way Gordon came to hunting and that the angel’s comment might have been less about surprise that Gordon knew what the word ‘fillet’ meant and more about surprise that Gordon could still go into a kitchen. From the way Balthazar’s eyes flicked up to the hunter’s face and then back down to the plate Gordon guessed that he was right.

It had been some time since he’d made the dish and as soon as fork hit tongue Gordon knew he’d forgotten something—nothing major as it was still quite good, but it irked him to know he was losing his touch—but Balthazar didn’t comment on it. Balthazar didn’t comment on anything. Finally, Gordon couldn’t stand it anymore.

“What’s happening here?” he barked out, a lot harsher than he intended to. Balthazar’s out of character behavior was setting him on edge. He hadn’t even seen the angel since the thing had hermetically sealed one of Hell’s Kitchen’s rooms on them. Gordon didn’t like being kept out of the loop no matter how insignificant he was in comparison to the almighty creature.

“For your benefit,” Balthazar said as though he was answering a question. A half-beat later Gordon realized that was exactly what was happening; Balthazar was answering the human’s surface thoughts. “You were the best gateway into this organization but talking to you too much was going to get you killed by your companions. Seemed rude to let that happen.”

Gordon had guessed that this was the case, but it was grudgingly nice to know that the creature had some consideration for the mess the hunter had landed in as response to the angelic help. Things had gotten back to normal, mostly, at least.

“Good to hear. And yes, I will probably keep answering you before you actually speak.” Balthazar rubbed his temples. The weary gesture was so _human_ that it left Gordon momentarily stunned. “In this state I have trouble telling the difference between what you think and what you say.”

“And what bloody state is that?”

Balthazar laughed and shook his head. “Tired. Just... tired.”

Gordon didn’t have to be a mind-reader to know that wasn’t the whole story, and he didn’t give a damn if Balthazar knew that Gordon knew that. Balthazar raised an eyebrow and chuckled. Gordon glared.

“Am I ever going to know what the fuck this is really about or is the stupid little human going to have to sit in the dark?”

“You are stupid.”

Gordon had expected the usual smarminess from the angel and had tucked back into his meal with the intent of tuning Balthazar out. He nearly choked on a bite of chicken when he tried to yell back an insult on instinct.

Balthazar looked mildly affronted. “What? You humans are blindingly stupid. You’re also frail and you have no natural powers to speak of, not compared to what you’re up against.” Then the angel shook his head disbelievingly. “And yet, you still hold your own.”

Gordon got his coughing under control, but he did not speak.

“I never hated humanity, not the way so many of my brothers and sisters did,” Balthazar continued, more to the room than to the member of humanity sitting in it. “I thought you lesser, sure, because empirically you _are_. You can’t shift reality with a thought. You can’t cross the globe in an instant. You’re not angels, but you’re... humans are fine at being humans and what more can we ask of you?”

Balthazar shook his head. “Cassie... he didn’t really care. He was a soldier, through and through, no time for frivolities. A century ago, Earth-time, and you’d have seen him telling me not to be so interested in the goings on in the human world and to worry more about the battle holding back the boundaries of Hell. Not that he ever hated you guys, either, but to him you were just sort of... there. He wanted to protect humanity because that was his job, not because he had any vested interest in humans.”

The next part was quiet enough that Gordon had to lean forward to catch it. “How far he’s fallen.”

“Fallen, like...” Gordon didn’t have time to get the rest of it out.

“No, not like him,” Balthazar snapped. “Never like him. The Morningstar fell for pride. Cas fell for love.” The fire drained in an instant. “At least, that’s how he fell the first time. Now... now I don’t know.”

Whoever this angel Cas was he clearly meant a lot to Balthazar. And clearly something had happened to cause a rift between the two of them.

“I’ll say,” Balthazar answered the unspoken thought again. “A rift shaped like an angel’s blade.” The angel made an impressive show of mussing up short hair and then leaned back in his chair. “It’s ending, well, in a sense. Right now, give or take a day. Lucifer is being put back into his cage.”

“Who—“

“Not important. Not anything you need to know. Let them handle the complete insanity and you and yours just worry about the collateral damage. Even with Luci locked back up it’ll take a while to finish mopping up all the demons who got through while he was running free, not to mention all the other malevolent things gone wild.”

Gordon tapped his fork against his plate, now empty, in thought. “So, what? You came in here ‘tired’ to tell me that the worst was over?”

“No. I went to Hell’s Kitchen to tell your board of directors it was over. But that was the version of me that belongs in this time stream. The version sitting in front of you is from your future.”

Gordon’s eyebrows climbed. “You can bloody well _time travel_?”

Balthazar held up a hand. “Don’t ask why I don’t go back and change things. I did, once, for a lark. Turned out to be a world of trouble.”

Gordon swallowed back his protests; he could see how time travel on a grand scale would cause problems. “So what else can you do?”

“I have a talent for other dimensions,” Balthazar replied conversationally. “There’s one in particular I found with no angels, no demons, no magic. There’s a TV show about hunters there, well, two of them to be specific. Inspired by the dreams of their version of prophets who can unintentionally see through the veil.”

“Oh, really?” Gordon was mostly sure that Balthazar was having him on, but he played along. “What am I in this alternate dimension, then?”

Balthazar went unfocused for a good awkward sixty seconds. When the angel ‘returned’ it was with laughter.

“You’re a chef,” Balthazar managed between chuckles. “Speaking of TV you’ve got a few programs in the pipes. In one of them you go to struggling restaurants and scream at them for health code violations and stupid design choices.”

“And?”

“And, it’s named _Hell’s Kitchen_.”

Balthazar kept laughing, and after a while Gordon felt the corner of his mouth tug up, then he was chuckling, and then he joined in. True or not, it did sound like something he would do.

As they settled down Gordon looked at Balthazar in a new light. Not that Gordon trusted him, not by any means, but he really wasn’t all that bad.

“That’s the first time you’ve thought of me as ‘he’ instead of ‘it’,” Balthazar commented absently. As he wound down he was looking more and more tired. “I think it’s past my bedtime.”

Balthazar stood, gave one last look around the grungy hotel room, and then finally his eyes settled on Gordon. “Kill a few demons for me, will you? And thanks for the last meal.”

With that he vanished, but without the sound of wings. Gordon stared at the space where Balthazar had stood and tried to work through what had just happened. He had the distinct impression that he wasn’t going to see the angel again.

He flipped the road map open and took in the three-dozen or so marks made on the page. They were color coded for major points of activity, safe places, and various caches of weapons or knowledge. There was one mark about a three hour drive from Gordon’s current location that was marked as a headquarters for demonic raids into the surrounding cities. Gordon picked up the phone and started coordinating an attack to wipe that particular infestation off the map.

Kill a few demons for Balthazar? Gordon Ramsay could do better than a few.


End file.
